#RhymeYourPhD

Something wonderful is happening on Twitter. Of course, that could be said of various trends on that social media outlet, but one that’s striking early academics right now is the #RhymeYourPhD trend. Liesbeth Corens brought the idea to life over the weekend:

Now I want ‘Rhyme your PhD’ like ‘dance your PhD’. Could be part of our ‘creative conference presentations’, @historywomble@EdmondJSmith ?

This type of thing is just one of the perks to being part of the academic community on Twitter. There have been other trends, too–a while back, the challenge was made for academics to to sum up their projects in tweets. (I looked for mine, composed while I was still writing my dissertation, but couldn’t find it.) To me, Twitter is a great space to share ideas, to see what others are working on, and to lend some fun to what can become difficult work. Exercises like #RhymeYourPhD are also helpful for cutting to what’s important, and to think about how to repackage ideas for others who haven’t been obsessing over the same topics for months and years.

So I spent part of today thinking about how my own project might be put into rhyme. I finished my dissertation several months ago, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to revise it into a book. Prompted by my good friend Micah Goodrich (who asked if I had participated in the trend yet), I set to work. It ended up a bit longer than 140 characters, and breaking it into multiple tweets would have lost some of the rhythm (if it has any to begin with), so I’m posting it here: